One piece of soggy toilet paper the right is now throwing up against the wall is the idea that it’s unsafe to imprison suspected terrorists in prisons located on the North American continent rather than in a facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This is pretty absurd on its face—if there’s one thing our government does a lot of it’s build prisons and hold people there—but it’s worth observing the element of bad faith here as well. The Gitmo location was, recall, never initially motivated by considerations related to the physical security of the space.

Rather, the appeal of the location was its ambiguous legal status. Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba, not the United States of America. But since the Cuban Revolution of 1958, we’ve had no Status of Forces Agreement with Cuba authorizing the presence of an American military base. Consequently, argued the Bush administration, neither Cuban nor American law applied there. This was somewhat daft if you ask me, albeit clever, but whatever you think of the merits of the argument that is why the prisoners were sent there. The Bush team never felt it was unsafe to send prisoners to Fort Leavenworth or to the supermax prison in Colorado, they just didn’t want to be in a position where they had to follow the law.

Right now, Ron Blagojevich is on television offering the most hysterical extended metaphor I’ve ever heard. It has something to do with cowboys and stealing horses.

Good news is, of course, a relative term when it comes to Congo—perhaps the country that’s seen the most suffering over the past ten years. But it seems the government of Rwanda cut a deal with the government of Congo to form an agreement to crack down on Hutu militias the Rwandans don’t like and have Rwanda turn on its proxy, the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda who Rwanda used to fight the Hutus but who’d been making all sorts of trouble and attempting, as Rwanda-backed rebels in Congo tend to, to overthrow the central government.

Mark Goldberg observes that this is a pretty unexpected turn of events since “last month a no-nonsense Security Council ‘panel of experts’ report showed that Nkunda was essentially a front for Rwandan business interests in Eastern Congo.” One hopes Kigali’s decision to switch sides will help put Congo back on a path toward stability.

Scott Lilly makes a sharp but important point about congressional conservatives fretting that the stimulus plan isn’t sufficiently fast-acting:

It is unfortunate that government cannot turn on the spigots of job creation more rapidly, and that the damage already done to households and businesses cannot be repaired more quickly. Those were facts that Rep. Lewis and his House Republican colleagues should have weighed more thoughtfully when they blocked a smaller stimulus package in September. Had it been passed and implemented then, money would now be flowing and the precipitous drops in monthly employment that we are now enduring might have been significantly softened.

Right on. As I recall, at the time the objections were that the plan was (a) too big, and (b) too slow. Now, months later, the situation has gotten worse. And that necessitates a bigger stimulus. And because it’s bigger, it winds up having a slower payout time. And payout time aside, we’re necessarily talking about “later” since now we’re talking about passing something in February 2009 rather than September 2008. Now conservatives say we’re talking too big and too slow. But this could have been smaller and faster had they not been singing that same tune back in September.

Conservatives have been touting a CBO analysis which indicated that less than half the money in the proposed stimulus plan would be spent within the next two years. But what it actually showed was that less than half the money involved in the portion of the stimulus plan that they scored would be spent within fiscal year 2009 and fiscal year 2010. That difference is important, because because there’s several months’ worth of difference between the time span “two years after President’s Day Weekend” (the target date for stimulus signing) and the end of FY2010 on October 1, 2010. It’s also important because the CBO didn’t score large swathes of the stimulus.

The White House has release to the press a letter form OMB Director Peter Orszag making these points:

The Congressional Budget Office recently released an analysis of a component of the economic recovery proposal; that analysis, however, did not assess the overall package. Our analysis indicates that at least 75 percent of overall package (including its tax component and the other spending provisions that were not analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office) will be spent over the next year and a half (the rest of fiscal year 2009 and fiscal year 2010).

We are committed to maintaining at least a 75 percent spend-out rate for the package as a while as the legislation moves through the Senate and House and into conference. In addition to jumpstarting the economy in a timely manner, we remain committed to providing unprecedented levels of transparency to the American people and the highest standards of accountability to the taxpayer about how the funds are spent.

So I’ve duly put this up on my blog. But this is why we need an OMBlog to succeed Orszag’s triumphant CBO Director’s Blog. They could put this kind of thing up there, and then people could just link.

Israeli officials explain to Noah Shachtman that their recent policies haven’t been erratic and irrational, they’ve been calculated to appear erratic and irrational:

Israeli leaders believe they’ve accomplished that task. “The Arab view is now that Israel is a crazed animal, locked in a cage, fuming to get out all the time,” a senior Foreign Ministry official tells Danger Room, approvingly. “Now, it’s the responsibility of the Arab leadership to keep the animal in the cage, by not provoking it.”

Despite my Forbes-based reputation for empiricism, in philosophical terms I’ve always put my allegiance with the pragmatists. In other words, I believe that a strategy that’s indistinguishable from an erratic and irrational one is an erratic and irrational strategy. Robert Farley observes:

The danger, of course, is that while erratic behavior might seem a plus in relations with the Arab world (not really, but stay with it), such a reputation most definitely isn’t a positive with the rest of the world. Some Israelis may sincere believe that they don’t need anyone; I suspect that this is the greatest strategic error of all.

To take an example, as Jon Chait points out Israel has traditionally counted on the United States declining to take an even-handed approach to Israel’s conflicts with the Arab world. That’s been accomplished in part by the use of institutions like The New Republic as ideological enforcers, but as Ezra Klein says the clout of such enforcers is often overstated. The larger factor has been a genuine lack of even-handed sentiment. But behaving in a “crazed” and brutal manner is not a good way to build social capital. When you ask, “why should Israel be, by far, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid money?” The response, “well, Israel is like a crazed animal, locked in a cage, fuming to get out all the time” isn’t a persuasive reply.

It’s also worth repeating Rob’s parenthetic. People sometimes think that a reputation for erratic behavior is an asset in international relations, but they’re wrong. This is related to what I was saying yesterday about democracies and cooperation. You want the kind of reputation that makes your commitments credible to potential partners and potential adversaries.